Calling cards

Text and photos by Deborah Holmes
Editor, The Old House Web

We were exploring our newly purchased home when a scrap of paper, just two inches high, missing its entire right corner, and wedged under an attic floor board caught our attention. We had stumbled upon a piece of Victorian ephemera -- a calling card.

Nestled next to the card was a second card, this one torn in two and missing its left corner. One bore the fancy script "Asinath Turner," the other "Ellen Turner." Though the little cards had seen the ravages of time, and less than gentle treatment, their images remained vibrant as the day they were printed.

I'd love to know where these precursors of the modern business card fit in the history of my 125-year-old house. Did they belong to sisters who lived here? A mother and daughter? Or were they left behind by visitors who sat in the elegant front parlor? Without a doubt, these cards played a major role in the lives of their owners.

At first glance, the cards seem a charmingly and impossibly tied up in rigid society rules. Yet, just as the images on the cards remain vibrant, so to, does our modern society's desire for orderliness, rules, tradition. Not only are authentic cards popular collector items, but a whole online industry of calling cards has sprung up around them. Dozens of Web sites invite readers to deposit electronic images in Victoria motifs on online bulletin boards and to copy images to use as e-mail signatures. These sites typically post rules regarding the use of the electronic cards -- guidelines that Victorians would find as impossible as we find their century-old rules.

Vintage cards can be found for sale on a variety of online auction sites, with prices ranging from under $10 for unremarkable cards in good shape to $50 or more for cards of recognized or famous people. It seems that everyone, from teenage girls to high society dames to presidents carried and left calling cards. And they knew the rules surrounding the cards.

These little bits of paper and ink were much more than a simple greeting. They were part of strictly observed Victorian tradition and etiquette. One book of the day, Polite Society, written by Annie Randall White and published in 1901, devotes no less than 20 pages to the topic of calling and calling cards. A card, Ms. White notes, "is but a bit of pasteboard, and would seem of no consequence, and yet it is a silent messenger which vouches for the cultivation and familiarity with good usages of its owner."

Furthermore, she cautions readers, "not to know when to call, how to call and on whom to call, would be an unpardonable breach of etiquette."

The cards themselves, and the way they were carried, folded and left behind were also governed by strict protocol. There were rules about the size of cards, the types of embellishments, about folding and or not folding cards, about placing them in envelopes or not and about the protocol for returning visits and receiving visitors.

In the 1879 book Deportment, John H. Young gives the following folding rules:

• Visite (The card bearer herself delivered the card)--The right hand upper corner.
• Felicitation (congratulations on a birth or marriage) --The left hand upper corner.
• Condolence--The left hand lower corner.
• To Take Leave (the card bearer is leaving town) --The right hand lower corner.

Cards delivered by servants were unfolded. Cards should always be left, Young, says because "where a lady is receiving morning calls, it would be too great a tax upon her memory to oblige her to keep in mind what calls she has to return or which of them has been returned."

Gentlemen too, were expected to leave cards when visiting, especially if they expected to be invited to the seasons parties and dinners. "Young men should be careful to write their street and number on their card," he admonishes. No decent Victorian woman would ever leave their address on a calling card, however, a practice Young sniffs, had recently been adopted by the demi-monde (prostitutes).

According to researchers of advertising ephemera at Duke University, calling cards were also exchanged on social occasions and also as tokens of affection, and were sometimes were saved as a measure of one's popularity.

At the same time, greeting cards became popular. Unlike modern cards which are folded and sent in envelopes, holiday cards were usually stiff cardboard the size of postcards. Often they were embossed or had fancy edges or fringe. Initially they were sent only on Valentine's Day, and Christmas. But by the 1880s birthday and Easter cards were gaining popularity.

A 1910 Postcard Image The Old House Web